


There's so much in life that's meant for you

by fairmanor



Category: Parks and Recreation
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Ben Wyatt Needs a Hug, College, Depression, F/M, Gen, Introspection, Love, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, time jumps
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-26
Updated: 2021-02-26
Packaged: 2021-03-17 09:22:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,240
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29715045
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fairmanor/pseuds/fairmanor
Summary: So it’s never left him, then. This pervading need to do. The delusion that if he’s constantly busy, it means there’s no space for the depression to squeeze through. The false hope that if he works hard enough, he’ll get somewhere he wants to be one day and then bam, depression gone. Apparently not.A ficlet about Ben Wyatt and depression.
Relationships: Chris Traeger & Ben Wyatt, Leslie Knope/Ben Wyatt
Comments: 7
Kudos: 34





	There's so much in life that's meant for you

**Author's Note:**

> I recently rewatched Parks and Rec and had some veeery different feelings about it this time around. Most especially, I did not expect to resonate so strongly with Ben Wyatt saying "you think a depressed person could make this?". Because it's meant to be a humorous line, but also...if you know, you know. So here's a story about Ben and his bad coping mechanisms.
> 
> Thanks very much to [seadeepy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/seadeepy/pseuds/seadeepy) for the help and reverse Britpicking and to [davidrxses](https://archiveofourown.org/users/davidrxses/pseuds/davidrxses) for the encouragement!

The first time Ben mentions it, he makes sure it’s the last.

It doesn’t feel like a particularly offensive thing to say. It was quite a simple process, really: he found a word for how he felt, then he decided to tell someone so he could do something about it.

In hindsight, perhaps his tense, stony parents as they drove him away from his first year at college weren’t the best choice.

“Depressed? What do you mean, depressed?” his dad asks, as though it’s the kind of thing he’s only heard in seedy medical dramas and newspaper articles about asylums. As though someone down his street was whisked away to sanction one day and everyone whispered the word like it was a swear.

“But you do so much, honey. How could you be depressed?” his mom says, and Ben would be comforted by the gentle concern in her tone if what she said hadn’t been so wrong.

“There’s your, uh…your Sillion book club, or whatever it’s called.”

“Silmarillion,” Ben mutters under his breath, too quiet for either of them to hear. “I know. I know, but –”

“You’re on the committee for the re-enactment group as well, aren’t you?”

Ben nods and churns his way through a string of _mhm, yep, yeah, I know_ as his parents list off everything he’s crammed into his schedule ever since he came to college. The debate team, ethical computer hacking, volunteering as a campus guide, cooking a different meal every night. They just keep shooting them back and forth without letting him get a word in. It’s the most in-sync he’s seen them in years.

“See?” his mom finishes. “You’ve done so much.”

_You’ve done so much. You can’t be depressed._

Ben doesn’t mention it after that. He doesn’t speak at all for the entire three-hour trip home. When he does get home, he shoves his noise cancellers over his ears and blasts soundtracks until dinner.

They mean well. Ben knows they mean well, in their own way. But he doesn’t need _well._ He needs to be allowed to feel this.

Summer comes and goes in a blur of movie marathons and glares on the street, then his second year is upon him. Hopefully, this time around, things might start to look up. Despite the rigorous schedule, his first year at college was a _mess_. As soon as he got there, he was so excited about finally leaving Partridge behind that he let himself go wild at the block party and got face-numbingly drunk on straight gin, ruining every shiny new first impression he’d hoped to make outside the hometown where everyone hated him. He met his new roommates as he was being dragged back into the dorm half-conscious at a truly embarrassing 10pm.

Maybe this year people will start taking him seriously. Maybe he can work out what’s going on in his head, even if no one will listen to him about it. Maybe –

“Hey, Ice Clown! Think fast!”

He’s just opening the car door, all strapped up to the brim with his suitcases, when a freezing cold water balloon hits the back of his neck.

Fuck. Maybe not, then.

When he gets to college, he signs himself up for all his usual extracurriculars. Then he takes a look at what’s on offer and circles five more things until his schedule literally doesn’t have a second to spare.

* * *

He doesn’t remember some of his twenties.

The worst parts pass in a shapeless, colourless blur of days into days into days, a cloud of bland attempts at adulting and carefully planned escapism. The best parts usually include new instalments of his favourite series, cities with GameStops, and Chris Traeger.

Cross-legged on his hotel room bed and ticking off his to-do list, Ben can’t remember whether this is city 23 or 24. (It doesn’t have a GameStop, though.) The terrible excuse for an Environment & Rural Affairs department they’re currently auditing are giving them so much hell that even Chris’ perpetual enthusiasm is taking a blow, which is…actually, it’s kind of nice.

Because it makes him realise something. It’s that there’s something in Chris that Ben feels a bone-deep familiarity with; a bond he can’t deny. It’s a mind that works like his own, the way they both push their thoughts to the side and focus on action and distraction. They both smother their schedules with activities, losing themselves in their respective hyperfixations of fitness and media-making.

They work in sync. Their ups and downs align. So, on a freezing winter evening in a city he can’t pronounce, when he doesn’t hear the tell-tale rhythmic thump of Chris working out in the hotel room next door, Ben puts aside the origami he’s working on and lets himself breathe.

A moment later, there’s a knock at the door.

“Chris?”

As soon as Ben opens the door Chris is striding into the room, giving Ben an exasperated look.

“I don’t know what we’re doing wrong,” Chris says for the fifth time that day, clutching at his hair. “We have done _literally_ everything we can for this department. It’s been six weeks and nothing is helping them at all.”

Ben wishes he could say it’s not his and Chris’ fault, but he can’t quite bring the words to the surface. He’s still stuck in the cycle that his parents accidentally ensnared him in on an innocuous road trip ten years ago. This nightmare merry-go-round of assuming the worst of himself every time he hits a snag. And then launching into overdrive when he hits that snag.

Against his own will, he takes a deep breath and fights the words out.

“Do you wanna go and forget about it for a while? We could go to the movies, just sit for a few hours.”

Chris frowns, turning to the thick notepad on Ben’s bedside table. “That’s not on your schedule. Or mine.”

“I know, but…I feel like both of us have trouble just sitting still sometimes. It might do us some good.”

Chris’ smile isn’t bright, or as peppy as it usually is. But it’s warm and relieved, and that’s what Ben was going for.

“What were you thinking of seeing?” Chris asks on the way there. “ _8 Mile?_ Oh, how about the new _Lord of the Rings_ movie?”

Ben snorts. “I’ve seen it nine times already.”

They settle on _Die Another Day_ in the end, and Ben stocks up on Pepsi and popcorn while Chris sticks to water. There’s no one in the cinema – unsurprising, for 9pm on a weeknight – but at least it gives them the opportunity to talk.

“I feel like it’s probably time to take the matter out of our hands,” Chris says over the cacophony of Bond’s screeching car tires and gunfire. “We can’t really do our job when there’s literally nothing there to work with.”

Ben nods. “I’ll talk to the CFO tomorrow, see what they think. To be honest, I just wanna get out of this place.”

Chris chuckles. “Do you think we’ll ever stop moving?”

As Ben thinks, the movie fades into a blur of flashing colour and clunky patches of dialogue. He fiddles with the empty container in his hand, picking at the plastic with his thumbnail.

“I’m not sure what’ll happen if I do,” he says eventually, hushed and almost shameful. “I just feel – I feel like I need to make up for something, you know? All the screwups when I was eighteen, every bad college grade. If I’m not doing something, then I don’t know what’s there.”

He looks at Chris, feeling a weight lift off his shoulders when he sees nothing but understanding and empathy in his friend’s eyes. Chris puts a hand on Ben’s shoulder and squeezes, a tight smile on his lips.

“I know,” he says. “I get it.”

And maybe Ben’s scared of getting to know himself, but he decides that it might not be too bad letting someone else get to know him.

He and Chris keep working together, moving from city to city followed by an increasingly recognisable pattern of highs and lows. Mood dips and reckless impulse. The only thing that’s certain is they become best friends, and they stay that way.

They’re good for each other, but sometimes the atmosphere of this life smothers Ben. It’s like there’s a fragile, dangling thread above his head every day, and he’s worried that planting his feet for too long will make it snap and send everything crashing down. Maybe he’s the only one who can see the thread. Maybe he put it there himself.

When things are bad, when he’s…when he’s feeling like the word he can’t bring himself to say anymore, it feels like an ache in the jaw that’s spread through his entire body. It’s like he’s nineteen again and seized up at the computer checking his final grades, wondering why it’s 75 and not 76, and somehow he got stuck in that feeling of stress and responsibility for the rest of his life.

Then comes Pawnee.

Then comes Pawnee, and Ben can breathe.

He can stand still. He stood still to get a better look at someone, and now he never wants to look at anyone else in his life.

There’s not a moment in his life since he met Leslie Knope that he wouldn’t give up anything for her. Including his job.

Until now, he’s been pushing his old feelings to the side, hopeful for a moment that they’d never actually crop up again. But no, as a well-timed visit and an herb smoothie from Chris remind him, it doesn’t work like that.

Chris told him the same thing they’ve told each other numerous times over the past couple of years. That they’re friends, and they help each other because that’s what friends do. But before, they always used to face these low moods together. They used to be able to laugh about being sad in sync. But now Chris is here, being normal and fine, getting on with his life, and Ben is at a standstill. He can’t even procrastinate right.

He’s _depressed._

About an hour after Chris leaves, Ben shoves the Claymation video three files deep in an obscure folder on his computer that he hopes he’ll forget about. He can’t watch it without cringing now. It feels like he’s watching a playback of the worst parts of the past twenty years. It feels like desperation.

He goes upstairs and starts to clean up. He starts with himself, doing all the laundry and teeth brushing he’s neglected in the past few days, then the mess he’s surrounded himself with. When he’s done, he looks around at the half-clean room – he’ll do the rest tomorrow – and slumps where he stands.

So it’s never left him, then. This pervading need to _do._ The delusion that if he’s constantly busy, it means there’s no space for the depression to squeeze through. The false hope that if he works hard enough, he’ll get somewhere he wants to be one day and then _bam,_ depression gone.

Apparently not.

“Ben?”

Around seven in the evening, Ben sighs and tips his head back. He’s been sitting on the floor with his back to the wall for the best part of the evening. Leslie headed back to the office for a while with everyone else, and Ben was wracked with panic and guilt at how quickly his excitement for being her campaign manager dissipated. That’s where Leslie finds him when she returns.

She pokes her head round the door, worry creasing her forehead, and crosses the room.

“Ben? You alright?”

He shakes his head once. “Nope.”

Leslie nudges closer, wrapping her arms around him and carding her fingers through his messy hair. “Thinking about work again? Listen, you have something to occupy yourself with now. It’s gonna be fine.”

It’s true. But it’s just not true enough.

“It’s more than that,” he says, feeling the dam getting ready to crest and break in his chest. “It’s – it’s…”

He’s not sure when he musters up the courage to start talking, but he must have at some point because then an hour’s passed and he’s still going, still pulling every painful grain out of this insistent wound, still crying on the bedroom floor of a house that’s not quite his. And for once, Leslie doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t try and pry his feelings away from him and make them her own, or tell him exactly how he’s going to start healing. She just listens, and the hand in his hair gets slower or faster in tandem with his words but never stops.

“I don’t know what to do,” he whispers eventually, inviting her to talk back.

She presses a kiss to his hair. “As much as I want to, there’s a lot going on there that I can’t help with,” she says. “I think if I tried I’d only make things worse.”

_God, I love you._

“How would you feel about maybe going to talk to someone professional?”

_I love you I love you I love you._

Ben nods, and something that finally feels like the next step beds itself down in his chest. “Yeah. I think I need that. A lot.”

“You know what you need right now, though?”

“What?”

“To go get yourself a shower then come and eat some of these warm cookies I brought home.”

Ben groans and drops his head onto Leslie’s shoulder. “The lights in the bathroom are too bright. I have a headache.”

“So shower in the dark.”

“What? I can’t do that!”

“Why not? There’s no rules.”

And he’s never thought about it like that before, so he does. He sits down in the shower and lets his eyes adjust to the dark, quickly realising that there’s much more light to take in than he thought. The shower soothes his throbbing, cried-out head and washes away the week’s mistakes.

When he’s out, he fights the lingering feeling that he should still be doing something and spends the rest of the night with his head in Leslie’s lap. He tells her what Chris had said, how he’d unlocked that old word he used to know, how he’s going to try and remind himself that there’s nothing wrong with being depressed.

And she doesn’t make it _better,_ or make it go away. There’s only certain things that can do that. What she does is make it…well, make it exist. Make it real. Make him realise that he can have these feelings and still be human, still be capable and functioning and alive.

* * *

Ben Wyatt didn’t know he could feel calm like this.

Until now, he didn’t know it was possible not to feel terrified at the prospect of having nothing to do. But here he is, half-lying on the couch, a week of saved up sick days ahead of him and his wife by his side.

He’s powered through work with colds and headaches for the past eight months to prepare for this week. They’re booked in for a C-section at the end of it, and there’s nowhere Ben would rather be than by her side for as long as he can before and after.

Leslie’s slouched on him now, her quiet whines of exhaustion the recognisable soundtrack to this part of the day as they have been for the past eight months.

“Tomorrow,” she’s murmuring in promise. “I’ll stop tomorrow.”

“You should have stopped working weeks ago,” Ben counters gently, reaching an arm around to run his thumb against her cheek.

Her face is rounder these days, the skin impossibly smooth. She’s beautiful like this, all soft and warm and heavy, and there’s something fascinating about seeing her so out of character yet so incredibly herself. She hasn’t been the jittery powerhouse she usually is for about two months now, but there’s something _new_ there, something soothing and hopeful in its place that makes Ben fall more in love with her every day.

Even so, she’s still sneaking onto conference calls when she thinks Ben can’t hear, still getting her PA to forward documents to her. He hopes she never changes.

She protests his light nagging, burrowing herself further into his side. “I know, but there was the whole conservation thing to deal with, then the surprise inspection, and…”

“And all these things are what you have your team for,” Ben says. “No one’s going to look down on you for just sitting still every once in a while when you’re pregnant with triplets.”

Leslie just grumbles, murmuring some absurd comeback like _“you’re_ pregnant with triplets” before she closes her eyes and is snoring a minute later.

A lot of their days end like this now, and Ben likes it. He likes it a lot. They have picnic date nights on the living room floor, and he’s only a few days away from editing the pregnancy bump time-lapse video he’s been working on slowly. To his usual harried self, he’s not doing a lot at all. He never would’ve thought rubbing his wife’s feet or learning how to assemble a baby bottle would be the most productive things he ever did, but…they are. With the help of therapy and this new, perfect life he’s found himself in, his days of instant gratification are slowly waning into the background. A distant memory of lost time and a past that he still needs to work through, but is definitely getting there. For once, he feels like he’s making an investment in the future he always hoped was waiting for him.

He sits for about an hour, sipping on wine and staring into the fire, not fixating on much except a couple of warm, gentle thoughts about the kids. When the doctor informed them that multiple pregnancies very rarely develop to the full 40 weeks, Leslie had been relieved at the prospect of induced labour and the Caesarean. Ben was happy she wouldn’t be in any more discomfort, but privately he harboured a little disappointment at the imminent loss of these slow nights. He loves rubbing a slow hand across Leslie’s stomach over her big cable knit sweater. He loves the _nothing_ of it all.

It’s not long before Leslie is awake again, jabbing Ben toward the kitchen to go get her that weird popcorn and tomatoes combo she’s been demolishing in ridiculous quantities during her third trimester. She snaps a picture of it for “the gals”, as she likes to call her online forum of moms expecting three, and eats half before her eyes begin to droop again.

“Ben?”

“Leslie,” he answers.

“What are you getting me for Christmas?”

He laughs. “That would ruin the surprise, babe.”

“No, I’ll forget! I promise,” she says.

“I’ll wrap the babies up and put them under the tree, how does that sound?”

Leslie giggles sleepily, craning her neck to look up at the softly winking Christmas lights. “I don’t think they’d like that. With the amount they’ve been moving I don’t think we’ll get them to sit still for long.”

“Do you think they’ll hang on ‘til the end of the week?”

“Yeah, the doctor said they’ll probably stay put.”

“Good.”

“So we have one more week of doing nothing, then.”

Leslie sighs. It’s an impatient sigh, but Ben smiles as he leans his head back and closes his eyes.

Right now, doing nothing sounds just about perfect.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! I hope you enjoyed, let me know what you thought :)


End file.
